STRANGELUV'S PROFILE

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Playing RMN Featured Games

I want to LT some of the featured games on RMN. Well, they don't have to be featured, just LT-worthy. What are some of the best featured games on RMN? I started this one, which people say is the worst featured game on RMN :(

Thanks bros

I live in Trinidad and Tobago. This is a small island nation in the Caribbean just off the coast of Venezuela. There aren't much outlets here with respect to hobbies. In primary school, the teachers always wanted you to write about what you wanted to be when you grew up. I always wrote that I wanted to be a videogame designer. When I was eight years old, back in 1994, I was introduced to a company known as Squaresoft, now known as Square-Enix, best known for their Final Fantasy series.



On a sidenote, I can say that Squaresoft also helped my vocabulary quite a bit as a child. When I had to fight baddies with names like Osprey, Mandrake, Behemoth, Inferno and Sirens with weapons known as Tempest, Mallet, Scimitar and Epee while equipping Amulets and Relics, I couldn’t help but look those things up in the dictionary. I later used some of those words in my Common Entrance practice essays.



This is me when I knew the word "Behemoth". I'm the one without the mustache.

These games made me love storytelling, and I wanted to tell a visual story like those guys at Squaresoft.

Fast forward past two awful break-ups, family dysfunction, a close shave away from parental divorce, a whole lot of cutting and general teenage angst to the weeks leading up to my Cambridge A’ Level exams in 2005. This was around the time Flash games were really starting to get popular. I didn’t know shit for my Organic Chemistry but I went Googling “how to make a game” and came across a program known as RPG Maker 2003. This was perfect, almost too good to be true. Squaresoft mainly produced RPG’s and here was this piece of compiled code, sent to me like manna from heaven, and if I was in a cartoon at that moment, my monitor would have been glowing gold punctuated by a chorus of cherubs.



Just imagine this with a heavenly golden tint.

I downloaded it and I opened it up. The graphical user interface seemed simple enough, so I spent a few days tinkering with it, putting sense to the program’s jargon – switches, variables, events, panoramas, mapping, chipsets. RPG Maker was so simple to use that you didn’t even have to produce your own graphics. You could simply rip characters from other games and use those if you couldn’t pay an artist to do it for you. So if you wanted to make a game about Mario, no problem!



I had forgotten that I had A’ Levels right around the corner. I joined a forum known as Gaming World, which attracted amateur game developers based around that program and my avatar was Jack Nicholson from The Shining in the infamous “HEEEEERE’S JOHNNY!” scene. My alias was, and has always been Strangeluv (by now you could probably tell I love Stanley Kubrick). There were innumerable projects posted on the website, though most of them were unfinished. This made me want to produce one of my own. I began work on it and I named it Wyesse.



Wyesse was about an errand boy who woke up (who also happened to be a skilled swordsman… go figure), was bored with his life and was visited by a sexy sorceress in his dreams. They eventually meet and decide to go into a forest named Nimerel to meet an elf named Meeko to defeat an evil wizard named Rashomon (I am cringing, just typing this). But members became interested in Wyesse because of a single screenshot that began circulating the website.


The main attraction.

This brought flocks of people to my game. Who was this new genius designer coming in from the snows to join their campfire? I knew Wyesse wasn’t going to match up to the other games on the site. It just didn’t have enough technical prowess, enough muscle, enough attitude. It was mediocre, if that. But the worst thing was that it was objectively mediocre. You can actually open up the code and say, “Hmm, this designer really didn’t put in that much work into this.” It just wasn’t good. And it got the treatment it deserved. People hated it. My childhood dream, to be a videogame designer, was turning into a nightmare. Comment after comment was just my designer peers thrashing it. They flushed it right down the crapper and Strangeluv became known as a ‘hype artist’ – one who can successfully sell a product that sputters and crumbles as soon as you touch it.

I quit the forum. I couldn’t take it.

Two years passed and I was now in my second year of University (don’t ask me about the Organic Chemistry). Around Christmas time, I fell from an elevated walkway and landed on my patella. Inflammation developed in my leg and I became quite ill for two weeks. On Christmas Day, I couldn’t leave the house, but I was recovering. Bored, I scrolled over old programs and over RPG Maker 2003. I don’t know what made me do it or think I could do it, but I wanted to leap right back into the fray.

But I had to regain my respect with the forum and dispel the “hype artist” title for anyone to take me seriously. So I frequented the Literature sub-forum there and set up a thread where I would critique any piece that anyone posted. I critiqued probably well over 100 stories by the time they made me a Moderator at the forum. With this new status, I was able to give my project some traction. I named it “A Home Far Away” and it was based on a story I was writing at the time, about a young boy and his sister who end up on a pirate ship and get taken to another continent. Then they must find their way back home.



Cap'n Grizzlybeard, the man who kidnapped the siblings.

I befriended a composer, a few artists and spriters and they helped me with the project. I read tutorials on how to code specific systems, such as a day/night cycle and weapon charging and I applied this new knowledge to this game. I even made a trailer for it in Windows Movie Maker with Bond violin music. When the game was released, it was divisive. It was too difficult and frustrating at parts, and the latter half of the game seemed too repetitive. Now, how did Wyesse go wrong? Why did people hate it? And why were people a little more receptive to A Home Far Away?

Sword and sorcery has never been my strong suit, and will never be. Anything purely dramatic of serious never has been either. But I think the main reason was that I tried to make something huge. I had planned the game to be about thirty hours long and to be a great fantasy epic. There's two problems with this. One: a first-timer should not try to do an epic. Even George Lucas had his THX-1138 before Star Wars: A New Hope. Even Stephen King had his magazine short stories before Carrie, and before The Dark Tower.

A Home Far Away was only a few hours long. I learned how to manage it that way. I didn't embark on a journey that was clearly longer than my feet could bare. I would get blisters and wouldn't even reach my destination. A year after I finished A Home Far Away, I made another videogame named Leo & Leah: A Love Story.

People loved it, it garnered 3000+ downloads alone on the site I frequented and it was featured on numerous website frontpages. A few people even posted fan artwork of it.



But I'm done with videogame design for the moment. Shit, I've completed two games. I'm more than pleased. Even though I'm only accomplished within certain niches, I still feel like I've risen above that mediocrity to produce something that people were inspired by and genuinely loved. But most importantly, I love my projects. It is literally a dream come true.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I owe you dudes at this site. You helped me get my project off the ground and gave it a home. It really means a lot to me. I've been brash in the past but I just feel so good to have a game to call my own.

I just wanna give some dvice. There's always going to be people who are better (whatever that means to your ego) at the things you love than you. Fortunately, there isn't really any one story, song, artwork, game that is unanimously the best. Or even unanimously good. If you know you want to do something, do it. It's hard to tell what's good and bad poetry nowadays, even. Shit, I read Derek Walcott the other day and didn't know what the fuck his poems were about. And he has a goddamn Nobel Prize.

Do what you want to do. If you like it what you do, you'll do it better. If you love what you do, you'll cry for producing something mediocre. And if you love it even more, you'll wipe them tears, mix them with ink, charcoal and binary code, and try again.

Thanks, bros.

I got banned from Chatroulette

Idk. People reported me. But I didn't even show my dick or anything.

What is life without the music?



The Last Musician tells the rhyming story of the collapse of six musical brothers. I dunno what else I could really say about this but I hope you guys give it a read and enjoy it. It's rather short and told in the form of a nursery rhyme so it's not anything taxing to peruse. I did all of the illustrations myself and took less than two weeks to do this whole thing, I believe. So I hope you all get something out of it :)

You can download the file here: http://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/8763/locker/LastMusician1.pdf

Here are a few illustrations from it:


The Silencing

THE SILENCING
A short story by K. Jared Hosein

Gyasi woke up on the shore of the solitary island, the dying fingers of the waves twiddling over his soles. The island sat in a silent realm, surrounded by an unending expanse of deep, deep ocean water. The starless sky lapped over itself, animated like reflux of water, and the Moon appeared as if it would on a pond's ebb. It was as if there were a second ocean suspended in the celestial heights.

This had been part of the operation.
You'll fix everything here, the physician had told him, You'll get a chance to do it all over.

Gyasi recalled the physician, aged and attired in a khaki cardigan, relating to him the risks and benefits of the operation. "This is so you could believe something you didn't before," the old physician said, "Whatever you do on the island, it will be hardwired into your neural pathways and you will believe it was real. That it really happened. The island will become part of your network. But I guess the risk is that outlandish things may occur on the island. Nightmarish, if I may."

"And I doh want to wake up believing in a nightmare," Gyasi said, nodding, tracing her fingers over his chin. But he didn't care. He brushed his palm over his hair and shook the physician's hand and asked for the earliest date.

A shuddering gale swooped over Gyasi's forehead, dragging a spiral of sand into his eyes. This prompted him to gasp and grunt, getting to his feet and rubbing his eyes with vigorous clenched fists. Wind chimes clinked in the distance but when Gyasi turned to look, he could see none, nor any domicile, quarters or even filament which a chime would dangle from. There had been no trees along the shore. Not one coconut frond. Not one coast dune thistle or fan flower.

Behind Gyasi was just an impoverished stretch of untilled sandy wasteland, working into furrows and folds all the way to a craggy slope. At the edge of the slope stood a monument, tapering to the tip, slanted and silhouetted. It had been the emblematic effigy of a lighthouse he had seen in films and book covers. The lighthouse at the edge of a forlorn sea cliff, with waves clawing at the base of the precipice.

Gyasi began walking to the lighthouse. He brushed sand out of his hair and elbows. He did not hurry. The physician had told him that there was no time limit. He would awaken when he felt satisfied with his new memory. He would open his eyes, bright with euphoria, laden with fulfillment. One world transcending into another. The island would join the archipelagoes in his mind and all unite into the complete Pangaea he paid his money for.

But what if I am never satisfied, Gyasi pondered as he meandered along the shore, What if I get stuck in this place forever?

But he tried not to think about it. He hung his head and looked at the coast. Back in Mayaro and Manzanilla, he would observe the waves washing over the tiny chip-chip shells, fissioned to look like calcified butterfly wings. As the waves would retract, the water would be pulled over the shells to look like two tiny jet streams. Myriads of chip-chip shells along the seashore would look like they were soaring in flight against a russet sky backdrop.

But there were no shells on this beach. Just like there was no fronds. Or grass. The waves pushed and retracted in almost an artificial way, as if propelled by some tidal mechanism in the distance, the winds by gigantic fans, oscillating and whirring from beyond the horizon. Gyasi suddenly felt despair, thinking about this. This all was artificial. He had known this, but being here on the island was a constant reminder of it. He came here to find a means of escape. The longer he stayed here, the longer he would realize how artificial this is. He needed to fix everything, so he could wake up with bright eyes once again.

So he could scratch his fingers against an early morning grin beneath the tussled blankets.

The sound of the wind chimes continued. He peered out again, but he could see none. They were growing louder. A swirl of sea breeze swept up some sand in a corkscrew motion. He was almost at the lighthouse now. Its white granite exterior had become apparent now as the darkness began to recede around its corners, like the last moments of a lunar eclipse. He breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed the stairway leading up to it. Though it was slippery and cracked and sandwiched by moistened salt and sediment, he was glad he did not need to climb up those rocks.

Cold, acid winds circled the top of the precipice. At the doorstep of the light house hung a tintinnabulum that rotated like a cradle's mobile. From it hung three little bells suspended from old twine leading up to a rusted silver trifecta of crescent moons welded together, clumps of metal banding together at their meeting position. The bells produced a soft jingling but nothing like the perpetual reverberations of the wind chimes. Even with the winds churning about his ear lobes, making muffled fluttering noises like an albatoss' wings, the chiming was still lucid and amplified.

To the right of the doorway stood a circular slab of marble. There had been a small heart-shaped groove carved into the centre of the slab and it was only until closer inspection that Gyasi noticed they resembled two footprints. A plaque rested on the back of the slab with a stanza Gyasi recalled reading from an old poetry collection:

"THERE is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea."

Gyasi traced his fingers over the fine lettering, over each carefully chiselled word. Chiselled just for him, for this experience. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sea. The black waters, washing over itself. Dark rumbling undines of the deep, growling and grimacing and swallowing and regurgitating themselves over and over.

"It'll be like it never happened," the physician had told him, nudging his spectacles, "You would have silenced that memory and all the pain associated with it. You'll wake up a free man. You've suffered yourself enough over it."

Out there, he had to go. To get her back. To reverse this moment, this wrong.But where? Which spot? In this deep, deep sea. Did he need to traverse this blighted Panthalassa in this permanent nightfall? He looked up at the Moon, still swishing as if it were its own reflection, tattooed on a lake crest.

The door to the lighthouse flung open and flailed violently against the wind, splintering its corners. Its dampened wood chafed against the lighthouse granite. Flakes of paint flitted off like white insects. Gyasi walked to the door and held it steady with one arm outstretched as he entered the lighthouse. In the lighthouse was a spiralling staircase leading up to a deck.

No wind here. And the air was dry. His skin felt itchy. He could hear the chimes again. But this time he could hear them coming from above. From the deck. They were not loud but he felt them giving him a headache. He also heard laughing. Chattering. Voices rinsed with that liming tone. They all made his head hurt. Gyasi clamped his palms over his ears but the sounds were just as clear. He could see the noon sun. Cards flipping over, aces, jacks, spades. A bottle of puncheon as a table centrepiece. The talking, the usual gibberish.

He began climbing the spiral staircase, his heart beating faster and faster. He could feel a wind now. A warm, sweet wind that could sway any salsa siren's skirt. He imagined her whispering in his ear, "Is a good day." He remembered his feet clasping onto his tough leather sandals as they walked into the old, dilapidated beach house. A relic of a past he knew nothing about, and imagined a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room amongst the old rubble and beer bottle shards. Even as its portico was falling apart.

"What is the memory you want erased?" the physician had asked.

Gyasi replied without pause, "My eight year old daughter drown a few years back."

The physician swiveled in his chair. "They found the body?"

"No," Gyasi said, hanging his head low, "She wash away."

Gyasi's heart beat viciously. He was almost at the deck. And he could hear the woman. "Oh, God," she moaned as she did not even know his name. They posed beer bottles against each other's lips, licking the dripping alcohol off each other's tongues. They put the bottles at their feet and he hoisted her skirt. His daughter would be okay, he had thought. He gritted his teeth. Ten minutes. Someone would watch her. The thoughts skipped in his head, making his eyes well up. Making his cheeks swell.

Gyasi got to the deck. And there he saw himself against the woman, just as he had been in the desolate ramshackle beach house. Her neck arching in dissipated bliss, oblivious to anything but her own nerve endings. Their feet shuffled as they moved. The beer bottles clinked, hitting each other, rolling back and forth, back and forth against her toes. Back and forth. Clink. Chime. Chime. Louder. Chime.

No sound left.

Just the wind chimes. At her toes.

Over and over again.

"Is a good day," he could hear the woman again.

Gyasi roared and grabbed the woman by her shoulders. She turned to him and now she had no face. Her features melted off. He bellowed at her. Bellowed like a madman in the street. And with one strong plunge, pushed her down the platform. She had no mouth. She could not scream. He turned around to see if his doppelganger was still there but it had vanished. Now he was alone. He peered down the deck and her body was gone. His face grew hot.

The chimes stopped. They were replaced by a low electrical humming. And it was only when Gyasi peered out the lighthouse deck window, he noticed the spotlight blaring on the ocean, forming an eddying orb of light on the tumbling rip tides. That's where she is, Gyasi thought. He knew it.

He rushed out of the lighthouse, peeling his shirt off his back as he scampered to the shore and dove into the water. He thrashed his body against the oncoming waves, floundering over them, his muscles sore as he fought the currents. But the spotlight was ahead. He looked at the lighthouse and its apex which discharged the gleam. Baby, I comin, he said to himself, I almost there. Daddy comin, baby girl. The salt burned his eyes, but he also had been crying. Tears lost in the silent ocean deep.

He swam to the spotlight and looked back up at the lighthouse. The golden light bathed him. Manna from heaven, he thought. A lone ethereal sun ray piercing through the looming shroud. But she had not been there. He swam the perimeter of the spotlight. His baby was not there. He then felt something clutching to his feet. Grassy tendrils binding his ankles and pulling him down.

But he did not fight. It was as if he was being chaperoned into the deep. Slowly, it dragged him through the waters. He could not breathe. But he found that he did not need to. As soon as his soles touched the bed, the tendrils loosened and lied flat against the lower stratum. There he gazed upon a statue sculpted from the neatest alabaster. He sighed, bubbles coming out of his nostrils, the only sound he could hear in the solemn stillness. Even through the turbidity, her tiny features fashioned against the compact gypsum were unmistakable. This was his little girl.

His Giselle.

He wrapped one of his arms around the statue and tucked it against the crook of his shoulder. He swam with the tides this time and getting back to shore had not been a struggle like before. He whimpered as he lied on the shore, the statue of the little girl lying rigid and horizontal next to him on the sand. She was here again. He could see her again. Her countenance set in stone. Her almond-sliver eyes, her button nose, even the tiny scar on her chin she had gotten while learning to cycle without the training wheels. He reached out and kissed the scar.

Gyasi got up and took her under his arm again, making sure not to drag her against the sand. She did not deserve that. He took her back to the lighthouse, to the pedestal and fit her tiny feet against the groove there. He kissed her nose and said to her, "Seeing you again make me so happy, Giselle."

He looked at the sky and saw that the night was ending.

Looking out at the horizon once again, he squinted his eyes just to see the sunrise in the milky lavender sky.

Polymorphous Perversity (18+ NWS)


Idk. Good stuff.

The things that make me happy, I hope they make others happy also."

A couple months ago I decided that I wanted to draw a picture that I could associate each year of my life with - well, more of a specific event in each year that has made some kind of impact on me. I decided to do it in images because I wanted to convey what was going on in my mind's eye at the time, and I wanted to challenge myself because well, I haven't had much practice as an artist so I'm not very good.


So here we have it...



I think everything came out okay overall. I uploaded a PDF with all the images, and descriptions at the side that would lend gravity to each drawing. I really felt like I put myself into this project, and I hope those who take a look at it get something out of it at the end.

It's not big. You can download it by CLICKING HERE!


And to close off, here are a few of the images I drew for it:








Magi's Ban

Since Holbert locked the Featured Game thread there, we will just have to discuss it here.

Please state why Magi was banned after serving RMN for 4 years and making one harmless prank.

Also Jesus Christ, this Captcha thing is annoying lol It gives me Chinese symbols and shit

Strangeluv's Let's Try

I'm gonna try to do some of these. I'll probably do like the first half hour of a game or so. If I like the game, I'll do more. So suggest projects for me :) Also, please, your game must be standalone. I don't have RTP on this computer.

To show you my style, I LP'd my own game, "Spike Lee's The Twilight Zone". That was my first time doing one and I'm pretty awkward at the mic, imo. But I'm learning.

Spike Lee




Pokemon Hunter 4


momomoko

Big up to all the Trinidadian RPG Makers: Strangeluv and momomoko.

Making RPG's in times of poverty and crime.

Laying down tilesets with guns pointed to our heads.

Editing charsets as we sip coconut water.
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